How to turn off animations on Windows 10

Windows isn’t known to be a pretty, or good looking OS. It certainly has a lot of UI inconsistencies and you will find there are still relics from Windows XP and Windows 7 present on Windows 10. The OS is supposed to be sturdy and allow users to get the most out of their hardware. While it may not be particularly good looking, it isn’t ugly. Microsoft has added some animations on Windows 10 that make it look better and make transitions smoother. These animations aren’t a major drain on your resources however, if your PC doesn’t have much power to spare, you can disable them.

Turn off animations

Animation settings can be enabled from different places e.g., the shadow under the mouse pointer can be enabled from advanced mouse settings. For a comprehensive way to manage all animations on Windows 10, open the Control Panel.

Go to System and Security>System>Advanced System Settings. This will open a new window with the Advanced tab pre-selected. If a different tab is selected, select the Advanced one yourself. The Advanced tab has a Performance section and this section has a Settings button that you have to click.

A new Performance Options window will open listing every single animation that can be enabled/disabled. You can selectively pick which animation effects you want to disable. You will find there are some animation effects that you barely notice such as the fade or slide effect for tool tips so it won’t be too hard to decide whether or not to disable it.

You can go through the list and manage the animations or you can select one of the two optimization settings at the top of this list; Adjust for best appearance, and Adjust for best performance. Obviously, if you want to get more out of your system you should select the option that gives preference to your system’s performance rather than how good it looks.

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Disabling the animations on Windows 10 will take a little getting used to but it’s no a drastic change in terms of UI. The animations are often subtle and you will notice when they’ve been turned off but you will also get used to them pretty quickly.

The animations make transitions appear smoother and they’re a little bit of extra work for your graphics card and your CPU but they’re not a real feature unless you’re counting Peak. If you use resource hungry apps like Photoshop or OBS, you will notice that they work a bit better with animation effects turned off.